Wael Ghonim

Wael Ghonim, Google’s marketing manager for the Middle East and North Africa, had been held captive by the Egyptian government for 12 days.   Recently released, he has been doing interviews describing what’s going on his country in which he describes it as an internet revolution, ‘Revolution 2.0′  is the name he has given it.  Here’s a 5-minute CNN interview with him (sorry for the link out, embedding has been disabled).

‘Revolution 2.0′ is a classic example of how a scene breaks down when a leader doesn’t share the narrative with a team.  It doesn’t matter whether the scene plays out over 30 years, as with Mubarak’s reign, or whether it’s the duration of your company’s offsite, the dynamic is the same:  Scenes in which one player tries to script and control the narrative are doomed to fall apart in a networked environment.

Not that I’m putting myself in the same lame league as a world-class scene hog like Hosni Mubarak, but ’scripting’ is my own biggest challenge as an improviser performing on stage.  For much of my career, I got paid for telling stories.  I made a career out of coming up with ideas that others on my team were tasked with implementing.  I led by articulating a vision that others would follow.

And then…

Through improvisation I have come to see that when you participate in a narrative without controlling it, the stories tell themselves.  I understand now that collaboration is the shortest path to implementation.  I realize that vision is only as good as what you can see in the moment, and that the best leadership is actually skillful following in disguise.

‘Revolution 2.0′ is a demonstration of the power of a shared narrative, and a global referendum on what leadership will look like in the Networked World. The Egyptian narrative belongs to the Egyptian people and the harder Hosni Mubarak works at controlling it, the more obvious this fact is going to become.

(UPDATE:  AT 8 AM PST ON FEB 11, 2011, HOSNI MUBARAK RESIGNED.  THE PEOPLE OF EGYPT ARE OVERJOYED.  CONGRATS TO WAEL GHONIM AND ALL EGYPTIANS ON THE END OF A BAD SCENE AND THE BEGINNING OF A NEW ONE!)

The extraordinary improviser, Paul Vaillancourt, gave me a list of sayings that have been compiled and passed around the improv theater community over the years. The great teachers Mick Napier and Del Close get some of the credit, as do Viola “The Godmother” Spolin and ImprovWorks’ Sue “Pond” Walden, though the exact origins of most of these sayings would be pretty hard to trace. What’s clear to anyone who explores improvisation is that the the meaning behind the sayings originates from the same place that accounts for such profound ideas as jazz, the Dao De Jing, Johnny Appleseed and Pixar Animation.  Here is the fifth in a series

Play against cliches. First, play with the cliches of your business.  You all know what they are.  Name them.  Call them out.  Have some fun with them.   And then go against them.  There is a lot of movement in playing against cliches.  Just doing this one thing can transform your scene into something delightful.

Think of the environment as a six-sided sphere, of which the audience is a part. What a brilliant way to determine your marcomm budget!  It’s 1/6 of your total operating budget.  Done.  Next.

The environment also has an outside and an inside. This is a good way of thinking about how your brand’s environment travels with the communication that represents it in the networked world.  Think of your network as a place.  What is that place like?  Who is walking the halls?  How is it lit?  What kind of art hangs in its offices?  What does it sound like?  All these concepts should be consistent and play off one another in virtual space and in reality. A friendly atmosphere in the office extends to the social graph.  Artfulness will be apparent in reality and in virtual space.  Clutter is as clutter does.  Etc. etc.

You don’t have to try to be funny, laughter will happen just by being human.  Being human is funny enough. A common misconception we battle all the time at GameChangers is that improvisation is all about being funny.  So not true!  Improvisation is about communication, learning, and transformation.  It is only by a quirk of genetic fate—Viola Spolin’s son, Paul Sills, brought all the games Viola had conceived with him when he and Bernie Sahlins co-founded Second City—that we in the U.S. associate improvisation so strongly with comedy.  Comedy is just a sliver of the output improvisation is capabl of generating.   It’s like saying all ice cream Praline Pecan.  Taint so.

Playful, direct, co-developed ideas, informations, and dreams will always be far hipper than one person’s alone. This is just a basic human algorithm.  The best ideas of eight people will always be better than the best ideas of one person.  Spare us your genius, and bring us something else.  Your work ethic.  Your brain.  Your smile.  Your song.  Your sense of smell.  Your experience.  But spare us your genius.  Because, you know…our stuff will always be far hipper than yours alone ; )

Marc was, to my knowledge, the best auto mechanic on campus.  He’d wheel his Low Boy under a car chassis, listen to an engine, or spider around under the hood and demonstrate that while you might have had the supposedly functional eyes, you couldn’t look at a car with the skill that he could.

He was one of the best students at Notre Dame.  And a party animal.  And a ladies man.  He had a great sense of humor.  In Sorin Hall, where Marc and I lived, nobody thought of him as handicapped.  Quite the contrary.  He was gifted.  By comparison, most of us were lazy, ignorant slugs.

I have not stayed in touch with Marc over the years, but I have kept tabs on him.

A few years ago, for example, Disney planned to release a feature film based on the sight-impaired Mr. Magoo cartoon character.  At first I heard the rumors coming out of Disney’s film marketing department.  “Someone in Washington representing blind people is causing trouble.”  And then I heard the name Marc Maurer, and I had to smile, because I knew it was game over, a mismatch from the get-go.  Dr. Maurer, who today is President of the National Federation of the Blind, chewed up the Mouse and spit it out.  Making fun at the expense of the sight-impaired is a mistake Disney will never make again.

Later this week, I will be conducting a GameChangers workshop for Executive MBA students at Notre Dame, and I intend to mention Dr. Maurer.  In researching him, I came across one of the best speeches I’ve ever heard.  In keeping with the character of the Marc Mauer I knew at Notre Dame, the speech is by turns intelligent, inspiring, and hilarious.  Take the time to listen to it.

Some of the beautiful ideas Dr. Maurer expresses in this speech:

If we let a single characteristic become the identifier of a person, it ensures that our estimate of them will be wrong.  Value is measured not by a single characteristic, but by the aggregate of those possessed by each individual.  Each characteristic contributes to the whole, and each may strengthen or hinder the person possessing it.

We live in a society in which blindness is thought to be a condition to be repaired.  Eyes that cannot see are broken.  However, it is false to say that the person who owns them is broken.

We, the blind, do not need to be fixed.  We are fine the way we are.  We can find our meaning and our purpose without modification or alteration.

I do not believe that blindness and helplessness are synonymous.  I carry the cane because it is a tool that helps me travel.  It is a tool of my independence, not a badge of my helplessness.

Learning should not be limited to what trains the mind, it should also train the spirit.

Your life belongs to you!

Note that it’s Federation OF the Blind.  Not FOR the Blind.  It’s not about what we can do for blind people.  It’s about what blind people can do for themselves, and if we’re lucky, for us.  Yeah, Dr. Marc Maurer is blind.  And his vision is just fine.

In our crazy race to escape these kinds of vortexes, we can turn direction-blind.  We pick a course of action, or someone picks a course for us, and in our all-out effort to escape a certain fate, we go heads down as hard as we can for as long as we can in that direction, like barn-sour horses galloping toward a distant barn.  A strategy, as Umair Haque points out in his latest HBR post, can be just as bad as a locked-in direction, because it can confine or limit one’s options instead of liberating them.

What Haque advocates, and what we could not agree with more, is adopting a set of behaviors (he calls these behaviors ‘Wisdom’) that foster liberation of the ideas and the ethical actions that can deliver us from the Goldman-Sachs Singularity, and whatever else sucks.  These behaviors have no time frame, because they are timeless.  They cannot be quantified, because they are potentially limitless in number.

One of these behaviors (me, adding to Haque’s list) is to Envision.   And by that I don’t mean Ayn Rand’s old Burt Lancaster-as-One-Of-A-Kind-Genius concept of vision but what I call ‘Viola Vision’, which consists of ’seeing and sharing what we see.’  This kind of envisioning expands our horizons, and gives us infinitely more options for escaping what sucks.  So in your quest for solutions, don’t forget to:

Look over. It’s how you get perspective on a problem.

Look under. Play with the dynamic of concealment and revelation.  Respect roots.  Dig deep.

Look sideways. My friend, the animation director John Musker, talks about stories as ‘taking an unexpected left turn.’  A sideways move can shake up your narrative in a way that keeps you on your toes and your audience engaged.

Look down. Who needs a helping hand?  Some days, this the only question worth answering.

‘Essence’ defines the core of a brand.  If brand is a tree, essence flows through its trunk.  Essence, especially at the beginning of a brand’s life, is often rooted to the sensibilities of one person or a small group.  For example, Steve Job’s appreciation of good design is at the heart of the Apple brand, Jimmy Buffet’s lifestyle is the essence of Margaritaville, and Tamara Mellon’s taste in shoes is the foundation for the Jimmy Choo brand.  Essence can also be an institutional philosophy like you’d find at a Japanese auto company, or a fast-paced technology brand like Cisco.  Either way, this is where a brand’s fire burns brightest, where vision is most needed, where a brand’s themes are distilled and defined.  It is where the secret formula for Coca Cola, Martha Stewart’s personal style, Oprah’s reading list, and the ‘Honest’ in Honest Tea reside.

‘Flexible’ is what the improvisational brand has to be at the edges of its network.  Continuing the tree analogy, flexibility is what you find in the tree’s outermost branches and leaves.  For a business operating in the Networked World, the edge is where the action is.  It is where creative disruption happens.  Where innovation is most likely to find its inspiration.  Most importantly, it is where a brand carries on conversations with its customers.  This is where you find skunk works, social networks, and tweets.  It is where buzz begins.

A brand needs both Essence and Flexibility to make a real impact in the marketplace, but it is interesting to note that a brand can be successful with a strong Essence and very little Flexibility, while the reverse is not true.  We have a word for brands with little or no Essence and a lot of Flexibility.  We call them doomed.   During the dotcom era, I once heard a pitch from a group of university scientists who’d lost their funding for a robotic crop picker and had somehow morphed their idea into a a proposal for a 3D web browser.  We in the audience failed to see the connection between the two ideas.  Those scientists never should have mentioned the robotic crop picker.  It may have demonstrated their Flexibility, but it revealed the absence of Essence.  They were showing us a pile of leaves and calling it a tree.

The priority is crystal clear.  Essence has to be the the first consideration.  If you got no Essence, you got nothing.

If the whole is going to be art, the parts must strive not to be.  If we strive to make everything we do precious and perfect and just-so.  If we deliberate and debate the appropriateness of our actions.  If we measure every move.  Craft and eddit every response.  The sum of the parts of what we CrEaTeToGeThEr.  Is.  Surely.  Going.  To be.  Yes.  Oh yes most indubitably and beyond repudiating to the level of a statistical certainty will most definitely be…(Say it!)  A pompous load of crap.

Always bring a brick, not a cathedral into a scene.   We know a businessperson who had built a well-deserved reputation for dropping big ideas on meetings.  That was his thing.  People were in awe of how inspired and forward-thinking his ideas were, by the compelling scenarios he painted for them with his words and emotions.  He liked this role, and didn’t do anything about changing it.  Why would he?  People called him a genius.  A visionary.  What usually happened, though, is that his big ideas died on the vine, or failed to live up to their promise.   His ideas were so big, so singular, that people had trouble adding their own bricks to his architecture.  In our friend’s mind, the cathedral had already been built, all there was for his admirers to do was worship at his altar.  We gave the genius an ‘adjustment’.  All we said was, ‘Don’t be the guy with the big idea.  Be the guy who makes other people’s ideas big.’  This has made all the difference in the world.  He has learned that it’s more satisfying and a lot less stressful to make his scene partners look good, and to not worry so much about proving his own genius  It turns out he’s just as talented at sharing his talent as he is at showing it off, and sharing has proved to be a much more productive way for him to behave.  Today, his reputation is for getting big things done.

Make the strange familiar, the familiar strange.  This is a great philosophy for keeping your brand’s culture lively.  Every business culture benefits from a flow of ’strange’ (i.e. alien to that culture) situations, environments and characters.  Likewise, if we get too familiar with our environment, our process and our fellow players–and most tragically if we quit surprising ourselves–our performance is going to get stale.  When every day is the same we lose our sense of anticipation.  If we dont’ think we’re going find anything, we quit looking, and the flow of new ideas drys up.  It is good to introduce some outside strangness into the workaday mix; it is even more potent to rediscover the strangeness within ourselves.

Don’t prolong the agony of a scene that is slowly dying.  Infuse it with the momentum it needs to end on a positive note.  There are a lot of business scenes ’slowly dying’ these days.  Meetings with HR end in pink slips.  Start-ups lose their funding.  Towns lose their biggest employer.   Often in these situations, the only feasible move is to end the scene quickly and move on.  It makes a huge difference to the rest of your performance if the bad scene ends on a postive note instead of a downbeat one.  A town that greets the news of losing its biggest employer with some kind of community celebration is already on the road to recovery while a town that gets busy telling lots of sad stories to the news about how they got screwed is going to be staying in the doldrums for awhile.

All masks are empty until they are put on and inhabited by the actor.  The same is true with job titles.